July 24, 2013

IBM Looks To Standardize Cloud Foundry Platform

IBM and Pivotal announced on Wednesday that their partnership will be continuing, and the two companies are reportedly working toward developing technologies for the Cloud Foundry platform as a service that will be compatible with Big Blue's own technology. IBM and Pivotal, will work together with open source cloud technology software, OpenStack.

"The Cloud Foundry model - an open platform as a service (PaaS) with wide industry adoption and support - forgoes vendor lock-in," Paul M. Davis posted on the Pivotal blog.

"This open platform allows developers to rapidly build and deploy applications on their choice of cloud services. IBM's adoption of Cloud Foundry within the company's open cloud architecture, and commitment to active development with Pivotal, users, and vendors is a major vote of support for the Cloud Foundry vision."

The PaaS was originally under the domain and direction of VMware, and enabled companies to run applications. However, the virtualization company recently announced a downsizing that put the Cloud Foundry influx - and apparently in play. This led to EMC, the parent company of VMware, spinning off non-core business units, which included Cloud Foundry, and a new company - that being Pivotal - was set up to focus on emerging areas that included "big data."

In a statement, Daniel Sabbah, general manager of Next Generation Platforms, IBM said"Cloud Foundry's potential to transform business is vast, and steps like the one taken today help open the ecosystem up for greater client innovation," "IBM will incorporate Cloud Foundry into its open cloud architecture, and put its full support behind Cloud Foundry as an open and collaborative platform for cloud application development, as it has done historically for key technologies such as Linux and OpenStack."

Pivotal has financial backing from a number of companies, including a $105 million investment from General Electric (GE). In addition IBM's partnership reaffirms the company's commitment to open source projects.

Big Blue is currently working with more than 9,000 cloud clients, and Cloud Foundry, as an open platform, will reportedly enable those clients to rapidly build, deploy and manage cloud applications in a more agile and scalable manner.

"We believe that the Cloud Foundry platform has the potential to become an extraordinary asset that many players can leverage in an open way to enable a new generation of applications for the cloud," added Paul Maritz, CEO of Pivotal, in a joint statement.

"IBM's considerable investment in Cloud Foundry is already producing great results with application-centric cloud offerings such as making IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty Core available on Cloud Foundry. We look forward to growing and expanding an open Cloud Foundry community together with IBM."

This week IBM and Pivotal also announced plans to create a community advisory board for the platform, and executives from each company will reportedly be responsible for moderating and preserving the brand.

IBM and Pivotal further announced a co-hosted event to take place on September 8-9 in Santa Clara, California. Platform, the Cloud Foundry Conference, is already being billed as "a unique community event focused on the industry leading open Platform-as-a-Service, Cloud Foundry." The two-day event will feature presentations by the "thought leaders behind the technology" as well as community presentations by companies that are currently utilizing Cloud Foundry.